Confusion 1. Explanation

When you follow the path of a creative, you have a lot of ways to get confused. One of them is explanations.

When I was a kid, my toys talked to me, I felt that there were ninja turtles living next door to me, instead of rooms, I saw a spaceship, and I was waiting for Santa on New Year's Eve. People call it a fantasy, but it's not true. For me, it wasn't something I was making up, but it was literally my reality in which I lived.

But adults destroyed my reality with their explanations and replaced it with their own. In reality, toys don't talk, it just “seems” to you. Santa doesn't exist, he's a fictional character, and the gifts are actually from your parents. You can't go into space because you need to choose a profession that brings money.

Such explanations appear from all sides and they are diametrically different from each other. You can literally do anything in this life except this, this, and this and explanations, explanations, and explanations.

You grow up, accept some explanations, reject some, and after a couple of years, without noticing it, you radically change them or, even worse, start trying to change other people's explanations. In the end, from the big questions “what is reality in general” you move on to small working explanations to the client “people don't buy this product because...”, “in tik-tok you need to make content in this way because the algorithm...”, “this advertising campaign conveys an important message to the audience – ‘Black Friday will be only two weeks’ in this way...”.

Hmm, but I thought Friday was just one day. Apparently, adults need their own adults to destroy their reality once again.

And having now an endless stream of information, you can fill every day with new and fresh explanations that you like: “drinking coffee is good for you” / ‘drinking coffee is bad for you’, ‘you should vote for the left’ / ‘you should vote for the right’.

The worst thing that can happen is that you think, “I've understood everything now.”

Example.

Having worked in advertising for almost twenty years, at some point I was sure that I knew what an idea was. After all, it's my job to come up with ideas every day. But then, when discussing ideas in the team, I realized that everyone perceives this word in their own way and has their own personal explanations. And when I started to unwind the ball, I realized that the clients who buy ideas from me also understand it in their own way. Then, following my own personal explanations, I saw that I was not explaining it the way I did a year or ten years ago.

So, to be honest, I don't know what an idea is. I feel it first and only then can I call it an “idea”.

Instead of just learning to note their feelings and follow them, creatives move to the level of explanations, and from this room they move to explaining explanations, and then even further, and so on. Until they get into a maze where they spend a lot of energy and start to burn out.

And to be clearer in this text, I will explain:

Explanations are just a tool used in communication. It is neither good nor bad, but it is something that can confuse you if you create your reality only from this material.